Frank Avray Wilson was an early post-war Abstract Expressionist painter and a leading force of British Abstraction. In 1953, he became part of the ‘Free Painters Group’ where he met Denis Bowen with whom he ran the legendary New Vision Gallery, a showcase for Abstract Expressionism and Tachism in Britain.

Avray Wilson’s scientific background instilled in him a necessity for structure and what he called ‘vitalist’ form in his work. The term ‘vitalist’ or ‘Vitalism’ was coined by Avray Wilson to underline the fundamental function of colour as more than mere matter. He discovered that colour was a form of pure energy giving a life as real as that of any natural organism to a painting.

His philosophical interests went much further than following the pre-war tendency to link art and science, seeking and insisting on a transcendentalism to counter the atheist or materialist credo of the post-war existential age.

Avray Wilson’s work is included in the following museums: Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh USA; Cleveland Museum of Modern Art, Ohio USA; Toledo Art Gallery, Ohio USA; City Art Gallery, Manchester; City Art Gallery, Leeds; ; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Leicester Museum and Art Gallery; The Southampton Art Gallery; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, British Museum, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London and Tate, London.